What Americans Really Think About Abortion

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Rep. Todd Akin's statements about abortion shed light on the
Missouri Republican's view that abortion should be illegal in all
cases, including rape or incest. However, it's a position that
few in the American public are willing to take.

According to polling data, Americans are split fairly evenly on
whether or not they think
abortion should be legal, but the opinions hover in a much
more gray area than is usually seen in politicians' chatter.

In an interview last November, political scientist Morris
Fiorina, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University, explained the public's abortion views.

"Most Americans are troubled," Fiorina told LiveScience. "They
think there are too many abortions, but they don't want to make
it illegal."

A 2009 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 46 percent of
people say abortion should be legal in all or most cases; on the
other side, 44 percent say
abortion should always or mostly be illegal.

Even among those who'd like to see abortion restrictions
tightened, a minority believe, like Akin, that the procedure
should be illegal without exception. According to the same Pew
poll, only 18 percent of Americans held that viewpoint. The
numbers were unchanged from the previous year's survey, Pew
reported.

Other polls find similar results. A May 2012 Gallup poll with a
margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent found that 77 percent
of Americans thought abortion should be always legal or sometimes
legal. Twenty percent said abortion should be illegal in all
circumstances. Notably, this 20 percent was much smaller than the
number of people who declared themselves "pro-life" (50 percent),
suggesting that people who identify with that label do not always
reject abortion in every circumstance. [ 10
Odd Facts About the Female Body ]

Attempts to restrict abortion access have become more frequent in
recent years. In 2011, states enacted a record 135
reproductive health and rights provisions, 68 percent of
which restricted abortion access, according to the reproductive
health organization the Guttmacher Institute. In the first three
months of 2012 alone, legislators around the country introduced
944 reproductive health-related bills, half of which were
designed to restrict abortion access (many of these bills will
likely fail to pass as happens with many bills.)

Nevertheless, public opinion about abortion has remained stable
since the 1970s. For example, a long-running survey by American
National Election Studies found that 11 percent of people said
abortion should always be illegal in 1972. As of 2008, that
number had budged only 4 points, to 15 percent.

"As long as there are really vocal minorities out there that
regard [abortion] as the most important issue in our lifetime,
and some of them do, there will be attempts to get it on the
agenda," he said.